Friday, May 30, 2014

And of course while in England I ate what the English would call potato
crisps, and what my American neighbors would call potato chips. I selected these two as a couple of
interestingly similar examples - both sausage and mustard

flavour.

You’ll notice that Corkers don’t immediately declare themselves to be either
crisps OR chips, but rather “Natural British Crunch” which sounded to me like a
euphemism for some sort of chemical construct, although the promise of East
Anglian spuds on the packet was vaguely reassuring, and indeed potato crisps is
what they are.

Both varieties definitely seem to be peddling some dubious version of
British nostalgia. Corkers have silhouettes
of phone boxes, Minis, cricket bats and whatnot. Tyrell’s have happy girls, perhaps from the
farm, perhaps from the factory, and they tell us, just in case we’ve been
living in a bunker for the last 30 years, that crisps go well with a pint of
”ale.”

I
can’t say I’d ever heard of Ludlow sausage – there’s no mention in Antony and Araminta
Hippisley Coxe’s Book of Sausages (which is my bible in these matters) but of
course it’s declared online that they’re part of a long and noble
tradition. This may just possibly be
true.

In any case I didn’t get a strong sausage
taste from the Tyrell’s, more of an all-purpose savory flavor, and they were
perfectly fine, and no doubt better still with ale (perhaps in a flagon for old
time’s sake). The list of ingredients
runs as follows, “Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Sausage
and Wholegrain Mustard Flavour (Lactose, Sugar, Salt, Mustard Powder, Yeast
Extract Powder, Onion Powder, Sage, Spice Extract, Pork Powder, Citric Acid,
White Pepper, Garlic Powder, Flavouring, Colour: Paprika Extract)” which leaves
me wondering whether there’s any actual meat or sausage in the mix. Again, I had never heard of pork powder, but I now know it’s a
pork-free seasoning, containing hickory smoke, dried jalapeno and a bunch of
other things.

Corkers tasted far more like the real
deal. There was a big tangy burst up front,
which I suppose was the mustard, though if I’d had to guess I might have said it
was vinegar, and then at the end there really was a genuine, intense, lingering
pork taste. How they managed that, I’m
still not sure. The pack lists as the
ingredients as “Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Yeast
Extract Powder, Potato Starch, Whey Powder (from Milk), Salt, Wheatflour,
Sugar, Spices (including Mustard), Natural Flavourings, Herbs, Onion Powder,
Natural Colour: Paprika.” So again no
obvious presence of meat or sausage, unless sausage can be construed as a
“natural flavouring.”

And finally, for those who want to believe
that British food is a series of unnatural shocks
that flesh is heir to, may I present the Very Peculiar Marmite chocolate
bar.

Now, I think anyone who goes out of their way
to proclaim peculiarity is already trying too hard, and so it was here. It really wasn’t very peculiar at all. It tasted fine, rather like one of those bars
of chocolate with sea salt. I got the
savoriness, and once you know it’s Marmite then you can taste it quite clearly,
but really I’m not sure I’d have got it in a blind tasting.

The problem I think is that it’s 98%
chocolate and only 2% Marmite, and I reckon 2% is way too low. As a man who tends to have both chocolate and
Marmite in the house I shall be doing some experimenting – 3 per cent, 5 per
cent, spreading Marmite thickly across a chocolate bar as though it were a
slice of toast. Hey – don’t judge me!

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

When I first moved to London I was aware there were establishments
called “eel and pie shops,” though I didn’t really know what they were. I liked pies and I thought I probably liked
eels, though I’d never had any (my childhood was both sheltered and deprived).

So I went along to an eel
and pie shop: I think it was Manze’s in Islington, but I could be wrong about
that; it was a long time ago. And I
imagined that I’d be ordering a pie filled with eel. This wasn’t the case. You could buy jellied eels, but I didn’t, and
instead I ordered what turned out to be a fairly standard meat pie with mashed
potatoes on the side.

The unique selling point however was the intense green
parsley sauce that accompanied the pie and mash, the liquor as the man behind the counter called it, and in fact, traditionally
the name is eel liquor, because it's made from the
liquid the eels have been cooked in, though I had no idea about that at the
time. The pie, mash and liquor was good,
but not quite the brand new experience I’d been hoping for. I had, after all, eaten plenty of meat pies in my life.

Now,
reading a bit of history, I discover that in their Victorian beginnings eel and pie shops really did sell eel pies,
but over the years eels have become ever more of a rare and expensive
delicacy. These days not all the surviving
pie and mash shops even make authentic eel liquor, but one that does is
Goddard’s of Greenwich and it so happens that I was recently at a launch/party/exhibition (for Bleeding London - go look it up) at the Cave in Greenwich, where Goddard’s pies were served.

Now you and I might think that this (below) is the way to serve and eat
a pie:

But in this case we’d be quite wrong, apparently.
According to tradition and custom, the pie has to be inverted, pierced
with a fork to open up the insides, and then vinegar is shaken into the
crevices along with the liquor. So that it looks like this:

The shrewd observer may also note that two kinds of pastry are involved
in the pie: the top is short crust, the bottom is made with suet. Suet pastry – hallelujah!

I’m not sure this is a dish that would convert many Americans to the
joys of British food, but I thought it was just tremendous. There was liquor galore (which might almost be an Ealing

comedy) both authentic eel, and vegetarian.

I suppose this was “low” food, though when you consider the
Rex Whistler Restaurant is serving faggots, and Fergus Henderson is serving
potted meat, who knows if that term means anything anymore? The meal I had in London that best covered
the high/low spectrum, was the Plateau de Fruits de Mer at the Bibendum Oyster
Bar, though there was nothing low about the setting.

Up at
the top end werelangoustines and crab and oysters, in the middle were Atlantic prawns
and brown shrimps, and at the “bottom” were winkles and whelks. Photo by Del Barrett (who also, most generously, bought the meal):

I’ve written elsewhere about the role of
whelks as a signifier of masculinity in northern England in the late 20th century.As I was growing up, my dad was the
whelk-eater, and as the lad I only ate cockles.I can’t say I was craving whelks all through my boyhood - they looked
vaguely unpleasant and had the texture of rubber - but I could see that eating them was somehow
synonymous with passing through the portal of manhood.

The Bibendum whelks came
in their shells, unheard of in the Sheffield fish market where I used to see my dad eat them, and here they were accompanied by lemon wedges, again unheard
of: in Sheffield it was vinegar or nowt.
There at Bibendum, squeezing my lemon wedge, I felt secure in my manhood,
while still aware that there might be certain old school northerners who’d think I’d
turned into an effete southern softy.
They don’t eat many jellied eels up north either.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Some people, i.e. anybody with a grain of sense, find themselves
offended by the crassness of the souvenirs available in the gift shop at the 9/11
Memorial Museum in New York: hats with the FDNY symbol,
cuddly stuffed dogs with a search and rescue bandanna around the necks, and so
on. Some people, of course, are offended by the mere
existence of a gift shop at the site. I
am prepared to be counted a member of both groups, without being much surprised
by any manifestation of human crassness.

And yet and yet; I see (above) they’re selling a cheeseboard in the
shape of the United States (though without Alaska and Hawaii naturally), and I
admit I found myself wanting one. It seemed, at first glance, inoffensive, but
then I noticed the three hearts indicating where the 9/11 terrorist attacks
took place, which of course makes it utterly untenable.

So I went online to see whether you can buy a cheese board cheeseboard
in the shape of the United States but without three hearts indicating where the
9/11 terrorist attacks took place, and it seems you can – there are various
versions available including this one found on Etsy, made by AHeirloom.

It doesn’t seem crass at all.
Before long however this version of America may well become stained, greasy
and a little bit cheesy. Go pick the
symbolism out of that one.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

I’ve been in England for a spell, doing the kind of things I do in
England; eating, drinking, walking, being a writer: it’s not the worst. I’ll probably do more than one post about my
eating adventures but here to start with are three small observations of the
English gustatory life.

On my
second day in London I had lunch in the Rex Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain. This, it seemed to me, is
everything a good modern English restaurant might be; a great looking room - in this case with
Whistler’s restored mural The Expedition in Pursuit
of Rare Meats (1926–7) on the wall. Hard to beat that.

The menu has depth, tradition and reinterpretation, a bit of nose to tail, a hint of foraging. Starters included nettle soup, smoked eel,
and devilled kidneys but I went for the “Air-dried Old Spot pork, with celeriac
and chervil root slaw” which was a bit more salami-ish than I’d been expecting,
though Old Spot is fine by me in just about any form. Safe to say I’d never eaten chervil root
before. I have eaten and indeed grown
chervil but I never even noticed the root; my error, surely.

Main courses were slightly less interesting it seemed to me: spring
chicken, Cornish pollock, and black bream, but I couldn’t resist the “Lamb
faggot, with minted peas and broad beans.”
If nothing else I knew it would allow me to tell my American pals I had a tasty faggot while in London. How we
laughed.

I also thought the service was terrific in the Rex Whistler Restaurant (though some reviews suggest it
isn’t always that way), and it was noticeable that none of the waiting staff I encountered
were native English. Maybe there’s
something in this.

On the last day of my visit we went to Walton on the Naze, in Essex, a
rough and ready and likable seaside town. We were in search of fish and
chips and we ended up at an anonymous fish
and chip shop where the food was decent enough, though the 10p extra charge for
mayonnaise or tartar sauce seemed a bit mean.

We sat outside on a patio (“Not for public use”) that was shared with the
traditional seaside restaurant next door.
There may have been some commercial connection between the two, but I
wouldn’t swear to that. We were there
for a little over half an hour from two o’ clock onwards, and we noticed that in that
time nobody went into the restaurant next door, though at one point a woman, a waitress I supposed, or possibly the cook, came out, sat at a table and ate a slice of
cake, then went back inside. That was
the only bit of business observable until a couple of minutes after 2.30 at
which point three middle-aged ladies arrived and went into the restaurant in
search of lunch. A minute later they came
out again: they were too late. The
restaurant closed at 2.30 and the woman who’d eaten the cake now reappeared and
locked the front door of the restaurant as the three ladies walked away.

Was this a bit of
absurdist drama? You bet. Or perhaps Catch 22. “We’ll stay open until we get some customers
and then we’ll close before serving them.”

There was something
thoroughly, familiarly English about this, something that some of us hoped was
behind us. How well we all remember going hopefully
into a pub with a big sign outside saying “Pub Grub” only to be told, by a
delighted barman, that service ended a few minutes ago.

Another manifestation of
petty spitefulness (or so it seemed to me) was to be found on the napkins in Pret A Manger (which
sometimes seems to call itself the less Frenchified Pret). We all know that Pret a Manger is part of the
new breed of eatery that employs largely meaningless words like good, natural,
handmade, etc. to describe itself, which is pretty annoying, but to be fair, the Posh Cheddar
baguette (above) that I had there was perfectly fine. It was the napkin (aka serviette) I had trouble with.

First there’s all that predictable greenwash about
avoiding “obscure chemicals” which I guess means that well-known chemicals are
just fine. But it’s that line “If Pret
staff get all serviette-ish … please give them the evil eye” that really gets
to me; encouraging customers to scowl at staff. Is that a good thing? At first I thought there was something quite novel about this, but then
I realized the truth is that in England, customers and servers have been giving
each other the evil eye for centuries.
It’s called tradition.